


Time. Blood. Jewels.

by darklittlestories



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Cutting, Eating Disorders, Gen, I am so sorry for doing this to Loki, Internalized Xenophobia, Internalized racism, Loki-centric, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Self-Mutilation, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-09
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-04-19 23:03:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4764299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darklittlestories/pseuds/darklittlestories
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A dark and violent idea of what Loki could have experienced while imprisoned in The Dark World.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time. Blood. Jewels.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Trovia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trovia/gifts), [hiddleston_loki_lover_au](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hiddleston_loki_lover_au/gifts).



Odin couldn't know what he had done.

No one could. They were all so myopic, so pathetically simple and literal that they actually saw the cell as the prison.

They'd left him his magic, bound though it was in this buzzing, over-bright cell. Doing so, they had left Loki his full, whole self and then locked him away with that vicious creature.

 

His eyes and ears burned with the steady thrum of power in the cell. The runes marched relentlessly at the borders of the barrier, twisting and writhing in their ugly geometry. Nothing was still; nothing was silent. That drone was omnipresent and unendurable.

It was a perfect mirror of Loki's mind. They had turned him inside out, crafted a gaol of his own nightmarish self and shut him up inside it, doubly imprisoned.

The first day, he tried his seidr on the guards, to influence them toward ignoring him. The magic sizzled and hissed at the barrier like popping grease over a fire. 

So he dedicated a quarter of an hour to speaking with them.

After that, when each of the four men had heard their worst suspicions and darkest fears about themselves elucidated in lurid and thorough detail, they turned their backs to Loki's cage. Without realizing it, each one of these Einherjar had moved several paces farther from both the cell and from each other.

Loki settled himself on the floor, his legs folded neatly and he calmly called a long, elegant dagger to his hand from the place where space folds upon itself. Then he conjured a sharpening stone. He could have brought from unbeing to being razors or knives that could split hairs. But he wanted the tactile pleasure and the steadying, meditative action of dragging metal across the stone. 

He spat on the smooth disc of coticule and pulled the steel across the surface in a slow and purposeful rhythm. The grit of the stone was fine indeed, the sound soothing. It almost drowned out the malevolent hum of the barrier's restless energy.

A length of time passed, and he tested the edge of the blade along his wrist.

It opened the skin with the finesse of a lover parting ivory silk to reveal crimson undergarments. 

It was neat, precise, and painless.

Loki watched, admiring the colors with a detached but appreciative eye: The delicate green-blue veins and the fair skin diffusing into the pink of a maiden's blush just where the flesh opened. The scarlet rivulet of blood contrasted beautifully with the pale skin, and a single, thick droplet beaded from the cut. He watched, fascinated and fond of the rich color here in this sterile room. And then he remembered the jewel-red of the eyes of the Jotunn and rage pierced his demeanor. His eyes and lips thinned.

 

Then the wound changed.

  
The skin moved together and healed seamlessly, no trace of a scar left for his effort. The tiny red sphere of blood remained, and he watched in shocked fury as it hardened and smooth, cut facets appeared. A ruby rolled from his wrist and fell to the floor with a barely audible clink.

He was on his feet in an instant, his rage incandescent. Roiling tendrils of seidr curled over his body and burned off into golden nothing.

His hand was clamped in a white-knuckled fist on the hilt of the blade and he suddenly turned it in his grip. 

He thrust the blade into his upper abdomen, just under the arched curve below his rib cage, as deeply as possible. His jaw tight as a vise and nostrils flared wide with the pain, he jammed the blade straight down. Agony ignited in him and he fell to his knees. The barest edge of control still in his mind, he silenced the cell, muffling the sounds of his fall and the animal grunt of pain that forced its way out through his closed teeth and lips.

He dropped to all fours, and the dagger fell clattering to the floor. A slick pool of blood followed, and Loki instinctively pushed a hand against the gaping wound. 

He screamed, and thrust in his hand and gathered whatever hot, slippery fistful he could grasp and pulled.

  
A length of time passed.

* * *

 

When he came to, he was whole. His tunic was cut in a jagged vertical slit, and when he moved—easily, as if he'd rested a long quiet night in a soft bed—tiny rubies fell from the tear in the garment. He could feel more beneath the clothing, cool and hard and worrying his skin.

Disgusted, he removed the tunic and threw it aside. He brushed off the jewels and ran his fingers over his abdomen. No evidence remained of his violence. A small pile of precious stones lay at his feet. Rubies the size of a child's fist, a hundred garnets, and great chunks of amethyst and tourmaline sparkled in the cell's unnatural light.

A heavy black diamond rolled away when he shuffled his feet to free himself from the mocking opulence.

Loki stared at the scattered pile of shimmering viscera, and slowly shook his head in denial. 

Then he was shaking vigorously, shouting and shrieking and gouging his skin with his nails while tears burned hot trails on his face. His skin broke and ripped, angry red streaks appearing and then healing instantly, and he quaked and listened to the patter of glassy red stones, tumbling onto the twinkling piles and the marble floor.

 

A length of time passed. 

He maintained the illusion of a serene but petulant once-prince reading and studying and eating the food that was brought.

Behind the façade, the piled plates became his time markers. Moons without shadows to limn their movements, the round silver dishes counted out his days.

* * *

 

  
On the fifth day, his mother at last picked her way through Odin's bindings to visit him in spectral form. Seeing her whilst unable to touch her unsettled Loki more than he felt it should, but in this madness his judgment was not to be trusted.

He spoke nothing of his actions nor of the hoard of jewels hidden under his glamour with the emptied plates. Of the food he was vanishing. 

Frigga saw her son's careful spells and refrained from comment or examination. She could not bear the indignity of looking for truths he had hidden. Loki possessed so little now she would not take from him his precious lies.

She was regal but warm, and she bore Loki's anger with the same patient resolve she had always done. 

She held her anxiety in check, then fed it out later into her looms in silence.

She had not spoken a word to her husband in seven days. Her elder son visited her and she bore, too, his fear and his anger. She saw his heartbreak and she stroked his hair and spoke but a little.

She cautioned him. She insisted his brother must have peace and silence now, and Thor paced and raged and wept and railed against his father, his brother, and the very realms themselves.

But when she fixed her turquoise gaze on Thor he listened.

"You will yet see him, Thor. You will have need of Loki and he, you. You will yet fight side by side. But I may not speak any further, my son."

 

And Thor knew that it was so.  
He embraced his mother, then bowed to his queen.

 

* * *

 

A length of time passed.

Loki stacked the silver platters into groups of sevens. 

It had been nine-and-thirty days since food, water, or wine had passed his lips. Four hundred eighty three days since he had tasted the yielding flesh of Idunn's golden apples.

And yet he was healthy. He made a looking glass and saw the hollows that had darkened his eyes and cheeks in his days in Midgard and the place before had fled. A thin but hale layer of flesh had filled in the lack. His skin was bright, fair, and clear. He was faintly surprised by his hair curling just below his shoulders.

He smashed the mirror with both fists and took up the larger shards.

He opened long, deep gashes on each forearm, and hamstrung his left leg before the pain was too much and he dropped the glass.

He added ten hands-full of garnets and carnelian to his treasures.

* * *

 

On the forty-first day Loki began to learn how to work ice from the air. The dungeon was dank and humid but the cells were carefully regulated and the air inside them was not ideal.

However, he was skilled and on the forty-third day he succeeded in calling a blade the length and heft of a broadsword that grew from his arm and turned his skin blue from his fingertips to the base of his triceps.

The next day, he sat the plate of food upon the table with a stack of books sent by his mother, then made a flat sheet of ice as tall and broad as his brother.

He stripped nude and shifted his skin. He called an ice blade as thin and sharp as a filleting knife. He sliced off short lengths of blue skin and his laughter rang out as a cascade of sharp, glinting sapphires and pebbles of lapis lazuli skittered across the floor.

He cut and healed and cut again, making a mound of blue and indigo. He liked these gems the best.

Then he realized that when the light fell upon and refracted off these jewels, they became the color of his brother's eyes.

He had not seen Thor's eyes in forty-four days and eleven hours and he had not seen them laughing in four hundred seventy one days.

Loki screamed and thrashed and beat at the barrier until his hands were bloody and burnt black. Onyx tore from the wounds and bounced on the golden barrier to ricochet across the chamber.

 

* * *

 

On the fiftieth day the dungeons were full. Loki made a blithe comment to his mother's ghost-like projection. He lashed out at her a moment later, when she dared to speak of Odin as his father, when she refused to acknowledge Loki's barely concealed question:

Where is my brother?

He grew gentle when tears shone in her eyes. Forgetting himself, he reached for her but his touch banished her image and he was alone.

The prison was a chaos of the noise and stench of warring species and creatures from all the realms but Loki was alone.

 

* * *

 

On the fifty-first day a monster escaped. It was the strange beast of a sort Loki knew he had seen in some dusted-over book but he could not remember the name of its ilk.

It was a hulking mass of a beast and in places, power glowed from within it at as though it were a grotesque sewn-up golem concealing fire behind the seams.

The beast approached Loki and sniffed the air as if it could scent his power through the barrier.

 

Or perhaps it knew a fellow monster by sight.

 

The rage bubbled up in Loki's blood as if answering the fiery beast with his own molten anger.

"You might want to take the stairs to the left," Loki said. 

 

Let Odin be dammed to Hel.

Let the beast slay him on his gleaming golden throne or in his own bed.

 

* * *

 

 

 A length of time passed.

 A page appeared, shaking visibly and swallowing several times before he spoke, his voice breaking.

 Loki nodded. The messenger departed and Loki lay waste to all his tiny world in a single flexing explosion of seidr.

 

* * *

  
Time passed.

Loki settled his illusion back over the cell, a shining skin over the ruin of his life.

 

Thor came, pained sapphires glittering in his eyes. He demanded the truth and Loki shut his eyelids over his emerald irises, and then he let it fall like the blood from his jeweled wounds.

**Author's Note:**

> I had a really hard morning after a really trying evening. I mentioned this on Tumblr in a pretty raw stream-of-consciousness. Trovia & hiddleston_loki_lover_au (http://fourletterwordsstartingwithl.tumblr.com/) both privately talked me through it (knitting is comforting even to talk about, T!) when I didn't think anyone could understand and I was touched so deeply. I was still in a deep dark, and I knew I needed to write myself through it.
> 
> This... happened. It just came out whole like this sort of. And it's obvious that the fairy tale of the girl who was "gifted" jewels dropping from her lips is lodged firmly into my mind, and so are the complete writings of Neil Gaiman, who in Trigger Warnings did a beautifully dark take on the fable. So I've named it in the manner of another Gaiman fairy tale re-imagining, Snow, Glass, Apples. 
> 
> Trovia and Four, you both have my loving gratitude and yes, I am feeling much better having written this brutal monster.


End file.
